Cloudflare CDN What Is It
For all intents and purposes Cloudflare is a CDN(Content Delivery Network) that can and will boost your sites load times and render the site for a better reader experience.For my regular readers,I must first apologise to my readers for my blog being unavailable early this morning.I quickly uninstalled and de-activated Cloudflare pointing my Domain Name Servers back to Hostgator.With in one hour my blog was up again.So why did my blog not appear when links to it were clicked
The simple explanation is that when installing and activating cloudflare CDN,the domain name servers had to be changed from hostgator to cloudflare.This in itself can take anywhere from 24-48 hours to propagate hence leaving my blog in an unobtainable state.This is the reason readers and myself were unable to visit or view my blog.I must admit being a little to hasty in de-activating cloudflare CDN as there are many reasons to have it installed.
So What is Cloudflare CDN
CloudFlare CDN, if you haven’t heard about it yet, is a relatively new service that acts as a kind of security and performance-enhancing proxy for websites. You keep your regular web hosting account, but CloudFlare CDN stands between your site and its visitors, protecting your site and making it faster for end users.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) can be a big boost in page speed by saving a copy of the fully rendered page and serving that copy from a server as close to the user as possible. Big CDNs like Akamai and CacheFly charge hundreds of dollars a month at the least. CloudFlare CDN, a new start-up, is hoping to change that by offering a CDN for free or $20pm for the pro version,which offers several extras. I tried it a few days ago and did not fully realize that the propagation takes some time.My fault and hence this post to say that I shall be re-activating cloudflare CDN and let you know that my blog will be unobtainable for a day or two.
You may be wondering why I wish to go ahead with this operation!
My page views have risen and correspondingly the requests to my hostgator server have risen.Unlike the big bloggers I am just unable top afford the cost of paid CDN service,which some big bloggers can afford like,Problogger and Johnchow.There are a few reasons that I wish to install cloudflare CDN.The first and most important is delivering my site quicker than just from my hostgator server,which is situated in Texas.Not close to readers in other parts of the world.The second reason is security.Cloudflare offers a level of security against known spammers and spam bots which put extra strain on hosting server.The third is speed of rendering my blog.
Speed Performance of Cloudflare CDN
On the performance side, CloudFlare CDN has 9 databases around the world where it caches the static elements of your site, such as images, JavaScript, CSS, etc.Cloudflare are adding more servers and services all the time.When someone accesses your site, the static elements of your pages are sent to your visitor from the nearest database. This has two benefits: less load on my host server, and possible faster response for my readers.Many users of cloudflare CDN have reported a gain of between 40%-60% in blog loading times
Content Delivery Networks bring a big performance boost to a site and with a free one out there like CloudFlare CDN, there’s no excuse to not be using it.As some have said,”Cloudflare CDN is a win,no loose option”I must add that Iowe a great debt of gratitude to iblogzone for the help they have given me.Di Tesco was most helpful in enlightening me on the IP`s propagation to Cloudflare
How to install Cloudflare CDN video
Update To Cloudflare CDN Installation
As mentioned earlier,My Cloudflare CDN service was reactivated with no problems.My blog did not even go down for one hour.I have today checked my blog page loading times and was pleased to find that my site was loading at 2.9 seconds which is a much gain from 6.3 seconds.The first video above is an interview with the founders of Cloudflare CDN and reveals some of the technology behind this great service
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Greg,
Thanks for checking us out & for looking at coming back. You shouldn’t, however, experience any downtime at all because of a DNS switch.
Damon Billian » I appreciate your comment,
Thje problem I experienced the first time I activated Cloudflare was that I had not white listed cloudflares IP`s with my host,Hostgator
I recieved an email from hostgator technical dept this morning and they confirmed that indeed all CF IP`s were white listedd
I am extremelyu pleased with the results from todays ping test.Before my blog load time was 6.3 seconds(SLOW).
This morning 3.2 secs.Avast inprovement as you can see
Keep up the good work,fantyastic service
Best Regards
Greg